"For Creative memoirs October 10, 2007:
I’ve already sent you the notice that we will have a special guest, Denis Collins, for the memoir workshop; and I hope you will come and bring friends, and also make his 7 p.m. reading at the Library. At two +- he will talk a bit about how he has transformed his own family memoirs into fiction.
However, you will also have a chance to read your own memoirs on autumn or aunts or whatever inspires. Here are a few more spurs-to-inspiration I have stumbled over and want to share---
This first one, especially as here in Calvert County we are, in a sense, on a sacred mountain, while beyond our safe slopes, others are hurling each other’s peoples into despair and grief:
Dogen's mountain retreat (One of fifteen verses on)
Joyful in this mountain retreat yet still feeling melancholy,
Studying the Lotus Sutra every day,
Practicing zazen singlemindedly;
What do love and hate matter
When I'm here alone,
Listening to the sound of the rain late in this autumn evening.
from: The Zen Poetry of Dogen: verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace. Steven Heine, ed.
And read the whole of this essay, whose link is on Poetry Daily:
"... what happens to a passion that, though it fuels art, remains in some essential human sense abstract, never altogether attaching itself to any one person, any one time or token of the perishable earth? Does art, at least in some instances, and for some artists, demand this, that they always feel most intensely the life they've failed to feel? Is it worth it?"
"Milton in Guatemala," from Christian Wiman's
Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press)
And though you must know this by heart, it keeps reverberating in my mind as I see this morning’s Patuxent and sweep away expired crickets:
Ode To Autumn
John Keats
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cell.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies."
